WEEKLY OVERVIEW

The Indonesian government has officially launched its open data portal today, starting off with 700 datasets from 24 agencies. According to the portal, it aims to promote a more credible government, better public services and encourage innovation in the society.

Evelyn Ruppert formulates an open data analysis which can be summarized as: absolute transparency is an illusion, since governments always choose what they want to communicate, and never share the most important information; transparency does not build confidence, but rather mistrust, since it can never be complete; the process of transparency limits citizens to the data that we choose to transmit to them; Open Data promises a more direct relationship with power, but in fact creates a new technocracy of those that can understand the data. Thus, close attention must be paid to documenting the data itself (who created it, when, why, etc.) in order to allow citizens to criticize the data that is given to them.

By their nature, expeditions are dangerous. But a difficult expedition offers scientists a way to get data that is unavailable to their peers. This is the central idea behind the efforts with “Into the Okavango” and with the Okavango Wilderness Project. Using a set of open-source tools, develop a system that puts every piece of collected data onto the web, in near real-time, for anyone in the world to use and share.

While many federal agencies have been using some form of analytics to follow their social media accounts for years, Twitter's announcement last week that its analytics dashboard will be open to all users could provide a broader reach into social government and open data communities.

With so much discussion currently rife across the media concerning how we should approach big data and derive value out of it, it is useful to look at the personality traits exhibited by those who handle it proficiently. If we know a little more about the mindset of the big data pro, then surely we will know how to handle it ourselves better, or so the theory goes anyway.